Hitchens was educated at Balliol College, Oxford. After graduation in 1970, he became a magazine writer. In 1982, he moved to Washington, D.C. In 1988, he learned from his grandmother that his mother was Jewish, but had kept her religion a secret. Hitchens remained an atheist and did not adopt any religious faith. He did not write about his religious views until his 2007 book God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.[1]

Hitchens tried to write from first-hand experience. To write his essays, he braved gunfire in Sarajevo, he was jailed in Czechoslovakia, and in 2008, he was brutally beaten in Beirut, Lebanon. In 2009, Hitchens agreed to be waterboarded. He wrote in Vanity Fair magazine, "If waterboarding does not constitute torture then there is no such thing as torture".[1]

2007 God is not great: how religion poisons everything, Twelve/Hachette Book Group USA/Warner Books, ISBN0-446-57980-7 / Published in the UK as God is not great: the case against religion, Atlantic Books, ISBN978-1-84354-586-6. [2]

2008 Christopher Hitchens and his critics: terror, Iraq and the Left. (with Simon Cottee and Thomas Cushman), New York University Press